The most consistently difficult transition that I see authors make is moving from writing their book to talking about their book. The transition is a difficult one because you have to reset the way you think about your book, your audience, and the key components of your message and story. One of the barriers is the idea that marketing is somehow more complex and mysterious than it is, but the heart of the transition really is just that: moving from writing your book to talking about it. There are many different platforms and opportunities to talk about your book and gain the interest of potential readers. In the video and the continued blog below, Amanda shares a simple tool that is the secret for marketing a book and helping you make that shift from creation to promotion: pillars.
Transitioning to marketing a book is difficult, but not impossible
When you’re deep into drafting and revising your book, you are well in among the trees. You are focused on close-up magic of your story and your message. When you’re among the trees, all the things you love about your book are the nuance and the details and that scene-closing sentence that finally hit just the right note. You love every single tree because they were all part of that labor of love you’ve spent months or even years crafting.
But those nitty gritty details are not going to persuade a potential reader to buy your book and invest their time in absorbing your ideas. It is not this tree or that tree that is going to entice them, but the whole forest. To show potential readers the forest, we need to boil it down to the best, juiciest, most essential elements to convince your reader to buy your book and read all those pages.
But it also doesn’t stop there. In addition to needing a way to talk about the big ideas in your book as a nutshell, you also need fuel for marketing efforts long term. You cannot simply place a book on Amazon and expect it to sell well. You need a plan to reach the community and attract your readers, and whatever strategy you take, you will need varied ways to talk about your book and incite that interest. To make it engaging and fresh, we need to balance that big idea against some details that give it voice and texture.
The best way to do that is establishing your pillars and preparing multiple ways to share each with your audience. This will give you a flexible plan for how you can share those lessons over and over across different platforms without it ever feeling flat, trite, or repetitive. A little bit of prep work can make marketing a book a lot less intimidating and more of the fun next stage in the life of your book.
What are pillars?
Pillars are the central tenents of your book, the primary lessons your audience can learn from reading your book. Consider a politician running for office. They should have many different and complicated approaches to political problems and issues, but they need a way to clearly and succinctly share who they are and what they believe in most if they are going to gain traction and interest (and votes). They will have certain touchstones that are essential and fundamental to their political philosophy that remain relatively static in their messaging. You’ll see that they are discussing them over and over again, but they have a tailored approach for the context. Whether they are in a friendly interview, debate, or conference speech, they will hit on all those same touchstones, but in different ways.
When you are establishing the pillars for your book, you want to choose about five primary lessons or touchstone messages that are at the heart of your book. These pillars are messages you should be able to convey very briefly if you need to, but that you can also elaborate on in depth. For memoirists, your pillars should not be stories or key plot events in your book, but the messages you want your story to share with your audience. They are core to the why of your book, which is key to successfully marketing a book.
The best way to do this is to read through your book as if you are a student, as someone who is learning from you. When you read through it in that way, oftentimes you’ll start to see that that the book is getting at the same idea in all these different ways. As you read, write that down as a potential pillar. Once you have gone through your whole book and brainstormed a list, narrow that down. You are looking for five essential elements that meet two requirements: 1) you could convey them in a sentence or two, and 2) you could also discuss them in depth.
Building up your pillars
It is very helpful to your main marketing copy to have established these main ideas, but the magic of establishing your pillars has just started. When you build them up, you will have the basis for marketing a book over the long term and taking full advantage of every opportunity to promote.
To build up your pillars, you will create a five-by-five grid with each of your pillars defined in their most concise form along the left side of your table. In the video above, Amanda outlines examples of pillars from her own compelling book, The Summer of 2020: George Floyd and the Resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement.
Along the top of your grid, you will fill in ways you can fill in each of those pillars by illustrating them to an audience in different ways. These will depend on the nature of your book, but no matter the genre, at least one column should be a story column, in which you can share a story that illustrates the message.
This story can be from your book, but it can also be something that didn’t make it into the book, as long as it relates to the same central theme. The second column can be an anecdote column. Anecdotes and stories are quite similar, but often anecdotes are quicker to share and don’t need as much context and background to be clear. So there will be times when an anecdote will be more useful to you than a story and vice versa. For memoirists, because your book is heavily weighted with story, you may even have three of your columns be stories that you can relay in longer and shorter ways.
The other columns will depend on the nature of your specific book and message, but can include categories like research, historical background, analogies or metaphors, exercises or questions for your audience, or calls to action.
When you have your rows and columns, you can start to fill in the grid. For each pillar, you’ll have prepared five different specific ways to share that message with an audience. When you’re all filled in, you’ll have twenty-five talking points that you can pull from.
Preparation takes the intimidation out of marketing a book
When you have these twenty-five talking points, you are fully armed and ready to give a focused, compelling look at your book with plenty of texture and variety, regardless of the context. Whether it’s a podcast interview, a book event or conference, a keynote, or a social media reel, you can express your core ideas in interesting and engaging ways. The limits of the grid also ensure that you can stay on topic and focused, which keeps you in line with a clear brand for you and your book.
When you are coming out of that drafting and revising stage and starting to move toward publication, start working on establishing your pillars. Think about how can you talk about this book in a way that is true to the book, in a way that teaches your readers the valuable lessons you wanted to get across, and in a way that’s interesting that you can feel really good about any appearance or public outreach. Establishing that grid will make marketing a book seem not only much more possible, but much more fulfilling.
